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The final weeks at Sao Paulo have passed very quickly. I have not only been able to learn so much in IT as I have really gotten deep into my project, but also of Brazil in general.

My project at Gaveteiro has been taking an interesting turn in these weeks. As I was testing my code, I wanted to find a way to know the accuracy of my results. I installed a feature to do so and realized that the machine wasn’t very confident with the answers it was giving me. As I explored further into the problem, I ended up realizing that this was because most products are bought by companies in bulk. This means big volume, yet little frequency. Since my code focuses on the frequency that products are ordered, there are many products that are ordered with very little frequency not giving my code the accuracy it needs. Therefore as the company continues to expand and gain more clients, the frequency of products will increase and in the future the code will provide accurate results. Although this code will be installed to the website in the future, Gaveteiro has begun inputting to the website my first code. This means that for every product, they will associate products similar to that one based on the orders from before. This is the code that I worked on the first couple of weeks and am very pleased to see them using it.

Aside from work, we have continue to explore Brazil. We were able to go to Rio and see the Christ the Redeemer and the Pao de Acucar. This has been a dream of mine and it was breathtaking and dreamlike to finally be standing there and witnessing these amazing sights. These are the biggest touristic attractions in Rio and I am so glad we placed them as a priority in our to do list. It was also nice to see Rio calm and quiet before the herd of tourists will be arriving to see the Olympics. The second trip we were able to take was to Salvador. We were able to spend some time at the beach and relax. Getting away from the cold of the city and just basking in the sun was definitely nice. These two trips were great and truly allowed us to see more of Brazil than just the city life Sao Paulo has to offer.

Overall I am very nostalgic of the internship coming to an end. The company was able to provide me with a great project that is very contemporary and something that really interests me. Finishing the project provided me great satisfaction and truly let me have a taste of the type of job I would like to have in the future. The internship not only helped me grow professionally but also personally. Responsibilities all associated to living on your own, measuring danger and the choices that you make in your stay truly make me feel that I grew a lot in my stay here.

Thanks SIBC for this opportunity thanks to our benefactor. Hopefully more interns will come and work for Gaveteiro and have a similar or even better experience than mine.

These last two weeks of the internship experience have passed by so quickly and packed with different activities. At work I was assigned to research and prepare a Google ad campaign for two different suppliers. I participated in the meetings with company representatives to outline what we want to accomplish with the campaign. In some cases the supplier wanted to focus entirely on sales but other times the campaign was aimed at educating potential consumers. With this information I worked with the marketing team to create something that fits what was outlined at the initial meeting. Although I won’t be there to launch these campaigns, we worked hard to leave it ready for when it beings in August. Before leaving I met with the marketing director of the company to leave an outline of a report that will keep suppliers updated on the progress of the campaign. The day before our internship was over we were invited to have dinner with the founders of the company where we got a chance to talk about our experience and exchange feedback on the process.

During our last two weekends in Brazil we decided to do some traveling since we had already hit the main spots in Sao Paulo. One of the weekends the three of us went to a beach complex close to Salvador, BA. Although winter here tends to bring a lot of rain, we got plenty of beach weather to enjoy our time there. This was a great chance to relax away from the city environment. We got a chance to see some traditional dancing, sports and crafts.

On our last weekend we went to Rio de Janeiro. Although I have been to Rio before, I have found that every time I’m there I find and experience something new. We visited the Christ the Redeemer statue and the Sugarloaf Mountain. Both places have amazing views of the city and are musts for anyone going to the city. While we were in Rio we also got to enjoy some beach time in Copacabana and got to see many of the preparations for the Olympics that starts in a few weeks. Overall we had a great time and got to see a lot of Rio in a few days.

As you have had a chance to follow, this internship taught me a lot about working in marketing but I also have had a chance to develop as a student. It was a well-rounded experience from which I will take a away technical work skills, soft skill and even personal life skills. I’d like to take this opportunity to thank SIBC, their benefactor and everyone who worked closely with me to create this opportunity and develop it to become what it did. I hope this blog post helps future interns at this company or any other to get a glimpse of what awaits them.

As my 4th week interning comes to a close I can reflect on a lot that I have learned and experienced. At work I continue to work with the marketing programs to improve the analysis capacity of the company. The ultimate goal is to connect the search query on Google to a purchase that is made through the sales team. Since this is a B2B sale it is not quite as simple as following a user through selection and a cart checkout. Tracking Adwords investments require multiple programs and webpage tagging. During July I will be accompanying the beginning of a new campaign with a supplying company. I’ll be monitoring the different keywords we use for consumers to reach the buying page and adapting what I see needs to be done. There is a lot of responsibility since the campaign requires a lot of planning and budgeting to work out.

In addition to working we’ve also had some time to explore the city on weekends. Last weekend we were pretty busy with events. On Saturday we attended the ND send off lunch and got the chance to meet some alumni, current students and rising freshmen. It was a great opportunity to meet some people that have been in the same position I am now and also get to talk about upcoming students about my experience there. Overall we had a great time catching up and chatting about ND.

That night we went to the traditional party in Brazil called the Festa Junina. We were invited by one of the people at the ND lunch to attend the one at her sports club. I had been to one of these parties in the north of Brazil but never here in Sao Paulo. I was able to try some different foods and listen to some music from the area.

This past weekend we also got a change to visit a few more touristic and traditional places here in Sao Paulo. Saturday morning we visited the Mercado Municipal and got to try a variety of tropical fruits and local foods. Every time I go there I’m amazed at how many different fruits and colors are in a single place.

Later we visited the soccer museum that is very interesting. The whole museum is built under stadium seats and it exhibits different aspects of soccer in Brazil and around the world.

Lastly, on Sunday we went to a Parque Ibirapuera. Although its winter here the sun was shining and the park was full. We got to walk around for a long time and visit one of the museums in it. The AfroBrazilian museum is about the introduction and growth of African culture and religion in Brazil when it began during the time of slavery.

These last few weeks at the internship I will continue to learn from the marketing campaign that recently began. We are planning to travel the next to weekends so I’m looking forward to the new places we will visit soon!

The past five weeks have been filled with activity both in and out of the office.

My overall project is on Market Basket Analysis which is a type of machine learning for giving recommendations. Similar to spam filters in our mail, the focus of the project is to filter through product recommendations, ultimately suggesting the best one for every product based on past data. I had to familiarize myself with the “Scikit-learn” feature in Python that applies the Apriori Algorithm and Baye’s Probability Theorem which are essential for Market Basket Analysis. The new algorithm created utilizes as a basis a list of all the product substitutes in a certain range of orders (which an algorithm that was created by the end of my second week provides) and associates them to each other. Utilizing association rule mining, inputting a certain product will output the product item with the highest association probability. Thereby the program is not simply recommending the most sold products, but rather personalizing the recommendations that it gives. Given that Gaveteiro is shifting to e-commerce, this code has great potential to increase their sales. The code still needs to be checked for correctness followed by uploading it to the website but a major part of the project has finally been reached.

Even on the weekends, we have not been able to rest. We were able to unite with the Notre Dame club in Brazil and meet the upcoming freshman that will be joining us on campus soon. We have strolled through Parque Ibirapuera, the best and most-known park in Sao Paulo, and tried authentic Brazilian gastronomy in the Municipal Market . We were also able to test our soccer skills by going to the Soccer Museum and learning in extent the evolution and rules of the sport with very interactive displays of major goals, narrators, and players over the years. We were mesmerized in Beco do Batman as graffiti covered every inch of an alley and we danced to sertanejo music in a traditional Festa Junina.

We are excited in planning some weekend trips outside of Sao Paulo to continue our mission of exploring Brazil.

Having lived in Mexico, Panama and the United States was no preparation to the complexity of life that awaited me in Sao Paulo, Brazil. My freshman year abruptly came to a close, and not more than 2 weeks had passed when I found myself sitting in a plane going to a foreign country with a foreign language, trying to immerge myself in a foreign culture. Sao Paulo, being Brazil’s largest city, is buzzing with life. The Sunday I arrived, the city welcomed me with the LGBT community protesting for their rights in the streets bordering where my apartment was located. I was very excited and nervous as I met Joshua Kempf, the CEO of Gaveteiro and Notre Dame alumn, who lead me to the apartment that would become my home for the next 7 weeks.

Acting as the middleman between retailers and manufacturers, Gaveteiro has positioned itself in Brazil’s industrial business offering over 7,000 products to their clients. Given that I just declared my major to be Chemical Engineering, I was placed in the Technology Department and my first project has been to create an algorithm in Rodeo (an IDE for Python) that can be uploaded to the new Gaveteiro website. The code compares all the orders of each client, and is able to provide product substitutes based on the brand. In this way, the website will be able to include possible suggestions clients can choose from in the case their specific product is not available at the moment.

Learning Rodeo has been tough, however, it wasn’t just work that was challenging, but also the additional day-to-day activities that come along with it. The first week was without a doubt the hardest. The two other girls who would be interning with me (Catarina who is also an ND student and Veronica who is from UM) would not arrive until later and I had to embrace living alone for some time. Buying house supplies, going grocery shopping, getting cellular data, figuring out transportation systems (all tagged along with a language barrier) was an enigma I had to quickly decipher. Once Catarina arrived to the apartment, although there was still a lot to figure out, it was a whole different experience. On the weekend we were able to visit one of Brazil’s major avenues called Avenida Paulista as well as go into the MASP (The Art Museum of Sao Paulo). We have also been able to try Brazilian gastronomy indulging in brigadeiros and eating at very well-known restaurants.

Jilian Michaels once said, “Get comfortable being uncomfortable.” I was put and still am in a position out of my comfort zone yet adapting more and more as the days go by. And it is in this way that, thanks to SIBC, that so far these two weeks have been challenging yet eye-opening.

Hello! My name is Catarina Daltro, I’m a rising junior and I’m from Sao Paulo, Brazil (but really I lived around South America my whole life). I started a week late because of a ND summer abroad program I was doing that overlapped the internship, but now I’m ready to start working. This summer I’m back in Sao Paulo for an internship with am e-commerce start-up. There is another ND students interning here with me (Veronica) and one more girl from another university (also Veronica) who will be arriving this week. For seven weeks we’ll be working at a company co-founded by a ND alum that sells office materials online to businesses.

*This is the warehouse of the company, they do their own deliveries so everyday we see trucks heading out with purchases.*

*This sign is posted by the door I go through everyday to get to my desk!*

Our first week was pretty busy. During the first two days I focused on learning how to use their marketing analysis programs, primarily Google Analytcs and AdWords. Once I got the hang of it, some problems in their set up were pointed out and my assignment was to try to find solutions that will make the analysis more comprehensive. By the end of the week I was able to solve one of the main issues they had, I created a connection between the Google searches that were being made, the page that it took them to and how often that lead them to fill out a form to get a price estimate. It was very satisfying to see that the hard work I put in during the week was able to generate something useful for their analysis.

*This is the work im doing with the marketing department, we can now report on the Google searches that are leading consumers to the website.*

Besides work, there has been a lot to adapt to. Veronica and I have never lived in an apartment (besides the dorms) so we have had to figure out how to make dinner, do sufficient groceries to last a week and how to fix the Wi-Fi when it goes down. This weekend we were able to explore a little bit of Sao Paulo. We walked around Paulista on Saturday and saw a few stores and malls in the street. We also got a chance to stop by the MASP (Sao Paulo Museum of Art), they had a very interesting temporary exhibit about children in different parts of Brazil.

*The MASP is located very close to where were staying so we had a chance to explore it this weekend. There was artwork from artists from Brazil and around the world. *

*Although it’s winter here in Brazil there is still some sun so we enjoyed walking around Paulista. As you can probably tell from the lack of parkas this so called winter is nothing compared to what we have at ND…

*Sorry for the delay of the blogs due to the internet blockage in China.

7 June 2015

Hi, everyone! My name is Dongyi Xia and I’m from Hangzhou, China. I’m going to be a sophomore and I am a Business (undecided) and History double-major. This summer, I got the internship opportunity at the Notre Dame Asia office in Beijing, China. This internship was sponsored by SIBC. Although I am from China, my hometown Hangzhou is located at the Southeast coast of China, while Beijing is at the north. The differences between the northern and southern China are great, and I was excited to have the chance to lived and worked for six weeks at the capital and to experience a different culture.

My partner and I were housed in a guest house of PBCSF, Tshinghua University. Our office in Zhongguancun was close to our housing, so we were not too worried about commuting. For the first two weeks of work, we focused on the Business and Culture Program (BCG) which were going to spend two weeks in Beijing. We updated a booklet for the students who were in this program. The booklet was meant to make the students’ lives easier and get to know Beijing better- it contained comprehensive information about transportation, nearby restaurants, cultural sites in Beijing etc.

We also planned a cultural scavenger hunt for the group of students! My partner and I got the chance to visit all the famous places in Beijing: the Summer Palace, the Old Summer Palace, the Olympic Park and the campus of Tshinghua University. We designed questions afterwards for the BCG students to find out the answers. My personal favorite is the Old Summer Palace. It was stunning in my eyes.

The Old Summer Palace

The Bird’s Nest

Candy Art by street artist (It is a pig, not a scorpion like my partner thought.)

Peking duck- Best food ever!

28 June 2015

It’s already the end of my fifth week of internship. Last three weeks had been busy but fun. On June 7th morning, we went to the train station and picked up the BCG group. During our third and fourth week of internship, the BCG group was in Beijing and they also lived at the guesthouse of PBCSF. Therefore, one job for me and my partner was to be the RAs of the students. Since the group arrived, our work was divided between office work (marketing materials, translation of “What Would You Fight For” series etc) and accompanying the students on their field trips. My partner and I split the field trips: she went to sightseeing with the students while I went to company visits.

For the company visits, we had been to several interesting companies: a real estate company named Savills, the US Embassy, newspaper agents like Caixin Media and Reuters. During the visits, students got to see the office space and hear from speakers of the company. Students got to know more about different industries and how business operated in China.

On the fifth week, right after the BCG group left Beijing, we were busy moving the office. The new office was in Chaoyang District and was near to the US embassy. The new office was more spacious but also further from where we lived. Now we’re spending two hours on subway commuting everyday, which is actually a quite interesting experience.

Left to right: my partner Teresa, our supervisor Miranda, and me

Visit to Reuters

Talk by the company speaker

12 July 2015

How time flies! It’s already the end of the internship. The last week has been super busy. During the last week of office we were working on new projects. I was mostly working on an academic trip to Hangzhou (my hometown!) and Shanghai for the Chinese Language Summer Program. We made a booklet containing the background information of the sites and companies they are going to visit.

At the end of the very last week came the fun part: I was going to go to Hangzhou and Shanghai with the group! We took an overnight train to Hangzhou. When we were there we visited a company named Westfield, whose CEO actually sponsored this academic trip. It was a company focusing on outdoor equipments. We got to visit the factory which was really cool. After that the group had dinner at one of the most famous restaurants in Hangzhou- Louwailou, which located right next to the famous West Lake.

The next morning we took a high-speed train to Shanghai and visited the illy Caffee company that day. The students got to enjoy the freshly made coffee and actually learned how to make coffee themselves. Later that night, the group joined the annual alumni picnic in Shanghai. The second day in Shanghai was scheduled for sightseeing: the Yu Gardern, the Yufo Temple and the Shanghai Museum. All of us were very impressed by the beauty of the ancient garden.

On my train back home, I could not help but wonder how fast the past six weeks went by. Reflecting back on my experience, I found it extremely rewarding: I’ve learned a great deal about how to collect information and compile marketing materials. I also improved on my problem-solving skill and learned to solve problems that may come up unexpectedly. Other than that, I got to really explore Beijing: visit the cultural sites, commute like a lot of people in Beijing do and try out different kinds of food there. It really had been a great summer. Thank you SIBC for this amazing opportunity!